Respected journal publishes UM terrorism study

Professor led team of undergrads looking at terrorist attacks

A Harvard-educated physicist and five University of Miami undergrads marinated themselves in a steamy classroom last summer to ponder a curious question: Can math help predict terrorist attacks?

They concluded it can, which led to a rare academic achievement, publication in the premier research journal Science.

The publication is a virtual Who's Who in the world of scientists. Co-founded in 1880 by Thomas Alva Edison, the journal over the years has published research by such luminaries as Albert Einstein and Edwin Hubble, the astronomer for whom the orbiting telescope is named.

The UM team's research also captured the attention of the U.S. military, which is considering ways to use the findings.

Team members never expected to get such attention, or to work so hard.

"It was challenging in a way I'd never experienced before," said Joel Botner, 21, of Pembroke Pines, who along with Kyle Fontaine of Orlando was one of two Florida undergrads who participated in the research.

The team was led by physics professor Neil Johnson, a Britisher who taught at Oxford for 15 years before coming to UM, and who studies such matters as quantum phase transitions in optically-driven nanostructure systems.

Johnson, 49, wanted to see whether mathematical models could be applied to terrorist activity. He had grant money for a summer project and put out a call for student researchers: 30 hours a week, at $15 an hour.

Fontaine, 20, an international studies and political science major, joined up for the money. "Originally, I didn't think anything was going to come of it," he said.

He later changed his mind. "I would have paid to do this, it was so worth it."

After two-and-a-half months of studying the timing of insurgent activity, the team concluded that terrorist attacks follow a mathematical pattern and could be charted. Terrorist activity, like other systems or species in nature, is a product of learning and improving over time, or the more you do something, the better you are at it.

"You can chart the curve by which they're learning, and predict [the timing of] future attacks and their success," Johnson said.

In its simplest form, the researchers put a mathematical value on the timing of terrorist attacks, calculating how long it would take to learn from earlier incidents and then initiate another one. Plugging in that formula, the researchers say they could predict with 30 percent to 40 percent accuracy when the next attack is likely to occur.

Of course, fate can stymie the researchers from saying exactly when an attack may happen. Unforeseen events such as weather or a traffic jam could skew the formula.

Besides Botner and Fontaine, the other students were Spencer Carran of Fairfield, Ohio, Nathan Laxague of Scarborough, Maine, and Philip Nuetzel of St. Louis, Mo. All had different majors, and each brought a particular skill to the endeavor.

"They were a perfect mix," Johnson said. "It was an unlikely group asking an unlikely question."

Botner, a senior computer science major now interning for Microsoft in Redmond, Wash., used his programming skills to analyze data from terrorist attacks in war zones and elsewhere. "I was looking at a lot of the numbers, trying to make sure that the method we were using was statistically reliable," he said.

"He was absolutely essential," Johnson said.

Fontaine, a junior, helped determine whether outside circumstances influenced terrorist activity. "I spent the whole day just digging through events in Iraq and Afghanistan," he said.

"He must have spent hours and hours endlessly trolling the news," said Johnson.

With the campus cooling system getting repaired, the researchers had to work in an airless classroom.

"There was a lot of sitting around, literally sitting around, and we talked," the professor said. "We used the blackboard as our thinking space, our work space."

Botner snapped photos of the complicated formulas on the blackboard and distributed them to the team. The photos later proved valuable when writing up the project's results.

Those results, "Pattern in Escalations in Insurgent and Terrorist Activity," was published in Science magazine's July 1 issue.

Soon the Department of Defense came calling. "They were genuinely interested," Johnson said. The study "might be useful for planning or going back and assessing progress," he added.

Johnson said he couldn't say whether the 131-year-old journal had ever published a study by undergrads. Neither could magazine spokeswoman Jennifer Anderson. Teams that review submitted research do not consider the academic credentials of prospective authors, she said.

Still, "Not just anyone can get in," Botner said. "As far as I understand it, it's rare for even professors to get in there."

Fontaine said his family is ordering back issues. But his pals are less than awe-struck.

"Sad to say, I don't think many of my friends realize what we did," he said. "They're like, 'Oh cool, you did research, you're in a magazine.'"